The Banality of Survival/Suicide is the third of four installments of a data-laden narrative. The story follows a parent in the fall of 2018 dealing with the conjunction of crises we face.

Another October day with temperature prediction in the high 80s. Baby girl and me are driving in our car, fueled by Jurassic period plants whose sun-converted carbon couldn’t be broken down and released by the yet-to-be evolved fungi. On the way to retrieve brother from school, I retrieve the Pete Seeger Smithsonian CD. Older brother hasn’t listened to it for a long time. I hype it to my daughter, “Here’s a CD with stories! You’re going to love them!” The stories fall back into my brain cells/body rhythms created by night-after-night repetition from the months my son enjoyed going to sleep listening to this CD.

Good ol’ Pete Seeger. From hanging out with the giants of the civil rights movement at Highlander Center to singing on Sesame Street. “Sam, the Whaler” is the first track on the CD. It begins with banjo licks and a story of a poor boy (Sam) who goes whaling (to make money). “Blow ye winds of the morning, blow ye winds high ho…” There is a union solidarity message at the end of the song and I feel happy about potentially indoctrinating my children with the perhaps a little forced stick-together-against-the-boss-who-will-try-to-screw-you-over message.

I revel in the experience of hearing something familiar for the first time in a while. I listen openly. Mr. Seeger says, Well they caught long whales and short whales. They caught big whales and small whales. That’s a lot of whales, Pete. They caught spotted whales and striped whales, ugly whales and pretty whales, black whales and white whales. That’s a whale massacre, Pete. I retrieve my phone at the red light. I read and learn. They killed whales during the Victorian era like white people killed passenger pigeons, buffalo, beaver.

I find the non-children’s version of “Sam, the Whaler.” It includes the line, “And say you’ll take five hundred sperm before you’re six months out.” 500?! Whale oil, lanterns, thousands upon thousands of whales killed. An insatiable appetite for destruction. A car honks behind me. Green light. In the children’s song the boatmen eat whale, drink whale, sleep whale, harpoon whale, cut whale, gather and render whale oil. Sam the young whaler wanted to eat chicken instead of mush. So he boarded a ship and learned to kill a keystone species. It is estimated that around 3 million shipwrecks litter the ocean’s floor and, coincidentally, the whale industry killed 3 million whales. How many of the sunken vessels are whaling ships? How many Eastern white pines were cut out of the Appalachian mountains to build these boats to kill these whales? Conversion of natural resources into commodities into cash: robbing Peter to pay Peter. And Pete is singing about it.

I recall a coworker who told me he would cut down the last tree on earth to feed his family. There won’t be a you, your family, or anyone else if there’s one tree left, you moron, I thought. Diplomatically, I suggested to him we all cut down lots of trees every day to feed our families (but I didn’t have a family at the time). I put the uneaten dinosaur food AKA gasoline into my car regularly so I can go to work. I look at my daughter, listening to the horror-show song supposedly appropriate for children. I skip the track. I find later that Pete Seeger wrote a sort of redemption song called “The Last Whale.” No one reads the retraction, the damage is done.